"Can you pass me that rag, honey?" he said as he ducked out from under the hood.
She handed it to him, watching him wipe his fingers. When he gave her a slow smile, she knew what was on his mind. Shaking her head, she stepped back. "Not until we finish what we started last night."
He frowned. "I think you've hurt yourself enough for one week."
That his first thought concerned her welfare was all the impetus she needed. "We've laid my cards out on the table. What about yours?" A part of her whispered that there was one more huge thing they still hadn't even come close to discussing, but she shushed that voice.
After what he'd said to her last night, she had no more doubts that Miranda was gone from his life. That weekend in Wellington had clearly been an anger-fueled mistake on his part and one she could understand, no matter how much it hurt. It was time to truly forget about it and move on. For all their sakes.
He closed the hood. "There's nothing to talk about."
She reached out with one hand and touched his lower back. "Please, Caleb."
Shame and need combined to make an explosive combination. Caleb turned on her, forcing her to break the contact. "What? It's some sort of trade? You talk and then I have to?" It was the instinctive striking out of an injured animal, harsh and without thought to the damage it might do. The response came from the part of him that had been hurt in a way no child should ever be hurt. That part didn't want to suffer anymore.
Vicki drew back as if he'd hit her. "Actually, I only wanted to help you like you helped me." Her whole body was stiff. "But clearly I don't know the rules. I'm sorry I was stupid enough to come out here thinking we were finally ready to give an honest partnership a go." Teeth obviously clenched, she started to walk away.
Even the wounded animal inside him had no defense against his intrinsic need to protect her from distress, especially when he was the cause. It didn't matter if the cost of protecting her would be seeing shame dull her eyes. Losing her respect was his worst nightmare, but that was no excuse for the way he'd lashed out at her today and yesterday. No excuse for cowardice.
He manacled her wrist to stop her. "Sweetheart, don't."
"Don't what? Expect more from you than you're willing to give?" she asked without looking at him. "Don't ask for your trust?"
Tugging her back, he tumbled her into the V of his legs as he leaned against the car. She shifted to look at him at last, her eyes holding more anger than sadness. He ran his hand over her arm. "Can't you just accept that there are parts of my life I don't particularly want to talk about?" It was a last-ditch effort.
"Could you accept it of me?" she asked. "What if I told you, 'Caleb, here are the parts of my life that you're invited into and those parts over there, the painful, horrible parts, those you don't even get to know about.'" She crossed her arms. "Is that what I should've done last night? Should I crawl back into that shell you so hate and stop bothering you?" Her gunshot-fast words smacked him in the heart.
"You used to be so non-confrontational."
"Do you want that woman back?"
He squeezed her waist. "Are you kidding? That woman barely talked to me." Though he made his tone light, he was terrified. What if Vicki never looked at him in the same way again?
At last, she smiled. "When did you learn how to be charming?"
That was the one thing no one had ever accused him of. "When I found out you can't get enough of me." He told himself to have faith in his wife's heart—she'd never look down on him. But right now, the reasonable adult wasn't in charge. Instead, it was the vulnerable boy who'd grown up being treated as if he were something dirty.
Her laugh filled the garage, destroying the anger that had colored the air an instant before. It made him hope. "Talk to me, Caleb. If I don't know all of you, then I'll always feel like I'm letting you down and I've done enough of that. No more. Talk to me." The last words were a whisper filled with so much need that denying her became impossible.
He let out a breath and started speaking, trusting his wife as he'd never trusted another human being. "You've met my parents, seen how they live, their philosophy in life."
"Art is everything and rules are for other people," Vicki said, encapsulating the creed that Max and Carmen lived by.
"Including the rules about fidelity and the meaning of marriage." Caleb could see comprehension start to dawn in her eyes. "They had an open marriage before I was conceived."
"Other lovers?" His wife's innocent eyes went wide. Her view on fidelity and loyalty was one of the things he adored most about her. She'd tried to divorce him but he knew absolutely that she'd never, not once, even thought about cheating on him.
He hadn't been as strong. Broken by her apparent dislike of being intimate with him, he'd wanted to take a lover, to show her that he was desired. That she'd never discovered his lapse was something he'd be forever grateful for.
"Yes." He confirmed her guess. "Apparently they were very mature about it. Then my mother got pregnant after she'd been with Max and another man … at the same time. She had no idea who the father was until I was born." The shame of his origins burned like acid. "Max was very accepting and supportive. On the surface, it was business as usual."
"But?"
"But soon after my birth, it became obvious I wasn't his—our blood types don't mesh." The discovery had destroyed the pretense and opened the door to hatred. "Even as a small child, I knew he couldn't stand the sight of me."
How did anyone ever learn to accept that the man he'd been raised to see as his father only saw him as a loathed mistake? "They never hid my origins from me and soon enough, I figured out why he hated me so much."
"What about your mother?"
"She had to make a decision very early on and she decided to stick by my father. I was pretty, much left on my own. There was no violence. But there was no love, either." How many times had he walked into a room only to watch his father walk out? As an adult, he couldn't understand how Max could have behaved that way to a child, someone who would have worshipped him given the slightest encouragement.
It was pathetic how much Caleb had craved Max's love. "I wanted my father to be proud of me but I eventually realized that nothing I did would ever make him happy. I'm a living reminder that another man touched his wife, that he not only allowed such a thing to happen, but also participated. Nothing I do will erase that truth."
"Oh, darling." Vicki kissed him gently. "How could they have done that? Blame you for their choices? You were a baby, an innocent."
Looking into blue eyes filled with anger on his behalf, he felt long-buried injuries surface with agonizing fury. But hope whispered through the pain. "Maybe it would've been better if my biological father was a stranger but the thing was, he wasn't. At the time, he was Max's best friend. We're carbon copies as far as looks go."
"You've met him?"
"He dropped by a few times over the years to see 'his boy' I hated those visits because after he'd gone, everything would get worse. Max … I swear that sometimes, he wished he could kill me and remove me from his sight."
She made a sharp sound and her hands clenched on his biceps. "Why didn't you go away with your biological father?"
"Wade? Wade is a drifter, a drunk with no fixed address and nothing but a battered guitar to his name. The real reason he came to see me was that he knew he could get a few dollars out of Carmen when Max wasn't looking. I haven't seen him for almost ten years, though I heard from Lara that he's shacked up with someone down south."
"What about Lara?"
"That's what hurts the most. When we were kids, I was the one who looked after her, made sure she ate and had baths. But as she grew older and recognized that she was the clear favorite in the family, she began to mimic Max and Carmen. After a while it wasn't imitation anymore."
It had ripped him to pieces to see rejection in the eyes of the very girl whose knees he'd kissed after a hundred falls. Sometimes, he thought it was Lara who'd done him the most damage. He'd become immune to Max and Carmen but he'd been wide open for her knife to the heart.
And there it was, his whole sordid history. Conceived in prurient lust, he had a biological father who was a worthless drunk, a stepfather who despised him and a mother who'd chosen to emotionally abandon him.
Yet he'd dared to dream, to reach for someone so pure and bright, someone untouched by the tawdriness that was his legacy.
Most of their marriage he'd spent grateful that Vicki didn't know the truth of where he'd come from. Sure, she'd seen that he had humble roots, but she hadn't known the true extent of his degradation. He'd never wanted her to feel shame at being Caleb Callaghan's wife, never wanted to destroy the shine in her eyes.